Military Base Closings

May 13, 2005

The front page article on CNN caught my eye this morning: The Pentagon recommended closing some 30 military bases and a number of smaller facilities. According to Rumsfield, this will save us $50 billion over two decades for the low price of 29,000 jobs.

Does anyone else see the fallacy in this? Certainly, I’d love to see our military scale it back a bit. But we’re spending over $400 billion a year on defense, and that’s not even counting the separate budget for Iraq. I have to imagine we can cut $2.5 billion a year without having to send 29,000 people looking for new jobs.